Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

When I first logged on to my Sina Weibo account to write my initial diary entry, I certainly never imagined that there would be 59 more entries to follow; nor could I ever have imagined that tens of millions of readers would be staying up late each night just waiting to read my next installment. So many people have told me that they could only finally get to sleep after reading my entry for the day. I also never imagined that this collection of diary entries would be collected in book form and published overseas so quickly.

Just as I completed my final installment of the diary, the government coincidentally announced that on April 8, 2020, the city of Wuhan would reopen.

Wuhan was under lockdown for a total of 76 days. April 8 also happened to be the date that websites in the United States uploaded presale information for the English edition of Wuhan Diary.

The whole thing seemed something like a dream; it was as if the hand of God had been silently arranging everything from behind the scenes.

Starting on January 20 when the Chinese infectious disease specialist Dr. Zhong Nanshan revealed that the novel coronavirus was being spread by human-to-human transmission and news broke that 14 medical workers had already been infected, my first reaction was shock, but that later turned into anger. This new information was completely at odds with what we had seen and heard earlier. Official media sources had been consistently telling us that this virus was “Not Contagious Between People; It’s Controllable and Preventable.” Meanwhile, even more rumors were circulating that this was in fact another SARS coronavirus.

Once I learned that the approximate incubation period for this virus was around 14 days, I started to calmly make a list of whom I had been in contact with over those previous two weeks to see if there was any risk that I might have been infected. The scary thing I discovered was that during this period I had been to the hospital three different times to visit sick colleagues. I wore face masks during two of those visits, but one time I didn’t. On January 7th I attended a friend’s party and later went out to dinner with my family. On January 16th I had a serviceman come to my apartment to install a new heater. On the 19th my niece visited Wuhan from Singapore, so my big brother and his wife took us all out to dinner, including my second brother and his wife. It was a good thing that there were already all those SARS rumors floating around by then, so I made sure to wear a face mask every time I went out.

Given my occupation and what my normal schedule looks like, it is actually quite out of the ordinary for me to have gone out so many times during such a short period. I suppose I was going out more because this was the time just before the Lunar New Year when people hold a lot of parties and host get-togethers to celebrate. Once I put everything together, it was really hard for me to say definitively whether or not I might have been infected during that period. The only thing I could do was work backward to try to rule out an infection by counting down, day by day, until I had passed that two-week period. During that time, I was feeling quite depressed.

My daughter returned from Japan on January 22, the night before the quarantine was announced. I went to pick her up at the airport that night at 10:00 p.m. By that time, there were hardly any cars or pedestrians on the streets. When I got to the airport, almost everyone standing outside waiting to be picked up was wearing a face mask; there was a heavy feeling in the air and everyone seemed extremely stressed out. There were no signs of the hubbub, chatter, and laughter that you normally see there. Those few days were when panic and fright were at their very height in Wuhan. Just before going out I left an online message for a friend of mine, telling her I was reminded of a line from that old poem, “the wind whistles by as a chill descends on Yishui.” Since her plane was delayed, my daughter didn’t come out of the terminal until after 11:00 p.m.

My ex-husband had dinner with my daughter the previous week. Then, just a few days before I picked her up, he called to tell me that something was wrong with his lungs. My guard immediately went up; if he was infected with the novel coronavirus, then there was a possibility that my daughter might also be infected. I told my daughter and we decided that she had better self-quarantine at her apartment for at least one week before going out. That meant that we wouldn’t spend the Lunar New Year together. I told her I would bring her some things to eat (since she had been on vacation abroad, she didn’t have any fresh groceries in her apartment). We both wore face masks in the car and although she is usually always excited to tell me all about her trips, she barely said a word about Japan during our drive. We were both silent the whole way there. The anxiety and stress that were permeating the entire city were also there in the car with us.

I dropped my daughter off at her place and then had to stop for gas on the way back to my apartment. I didn’t get home until 1:00 a.m. As soon as I returned home I turned on the computer and immediately saw the news: The quarantine would be imminently going into effect. Although a few people had suggested shutting down the city, I remember thinking “how are you supposed to lock down a city as big as Wuhan?” So when the order came down, I really didn’t expect it. The quarantine order also made me realize that this infectious disease that had been spreading must have already gotten to an extremely serious point.

The next day, I went out to buy some face masks and groceries. The streets were very quiet. I don’t think I’d ever seen the streets of Wuhan so wide open and deserted. Seeing those desolate streets made me very sad; my heart felt as empty as those abandoned avenues. That was a feeling I had never before experienced in my life—that feeling of uncertainty about the fate of my city, that uncertainty about whether my family members and I had been infected, and all the uncertainties about the future. All that left me with a strange feeling of confusion and anxiety.

I went out again for the next two days in search of face masks, but the only people I encountered out on those empty streets were a few solitary street sweepers. Since there were so few pedestrians out, the streets were not even very dirty, but they kept frantically sweeping. For some reason, that scene gave me a strange sense of consolation and really set my heart at ease.

On my way home, I kept wondering, since I had first heard about this virus back on December 31, how come everyone had such a lax attitude about it for the following 20 days? We should have already learned our lesson from the SARS outbreak back in 2003. This “why” is also a question that a lot of people had been asking themselves. Why?

To be perfectly frank, part of the reason is that we had been too careless, and there are also objective life situations that contributed to that. But more important is the fact that we have placed too much faith in our government. We had faith that there was no way that the governmental leaders in Hubei Province would adopt such a lax and irresponsible attitude when it came to such a critical event where lives were in the balance. We also had faith that they would never hold fast to their “political correctness” and old ways of doing business in the face of a new threat that could affect the lives of millions of people. And we had faith that they would have better common sense and exercise better decision-making skills when a real threat was afoot. It was owing to that faith that I even sent a message to one of my WeChat groups saying: “The government would never dare to try to conceal something so huge.” But in reality, as we now see how things have evolved, we know that a portion of the blame for this catastrophe lies with human error.